Chapter 1.1 - 1.2

CARTER

CHAPTER 1

Calls

My story began at work. It was a cold Tuesday afternoon in Phobos City. The radiator was broken, and everybody had sweaters over their bodies and hot coffee or chocolate in their hands. The office had become a mini Winter Wonderland, save for the snow which had yet to fall for that year.

I eyed the jumbled mass of numbers as they scrolled across the computer screen, feeding my head with information only I could understand. Names were to one side, particulars on the other. An unchecked box entered my view. This was someone whom we haven’t hit.

I punched the numbers on my phone, as the fingers on my other hand twirled a pen like a bandleader’s baton. The dialling tone came. I waited for someone on the other end of the line to answer it.

I heard a clink and a cough. “Hello, Southeastern Motorworks, Jenna speaking,” went the voice.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” I greeted. It was always good to greet them. Your routine becomes more agreeable if you’re polite. “I’m calling from Dataminer Business Consulting, on behalf of Shell. I’m actually conducting a survey on motor oil usage in Mars County, so I was hoping if you could spare-”

“You’re a telemarketer? Fuck you, asshole.” She hung up. In reality, courtesy wasn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

My job had never been easy. I had to collect information from unsuspecting households and personal assistants about the most mundane of subjects, from mothballs to motor oil. And then, I crunch the statistics and relay them to my boss. Then he shows it to the companies that contracted us for the information.

So it wasn’t exactly telemarketing. Yet, talking to an unknown voice, describing every intimate detail of your life to someone you’ve never met - and will never meet - is every bit as disturbing as being pushed by a telemarketer. Sometimes I don’t get why the idiots over at Shell or DuPont, or hell, even Wendy’s, think that they’d get a straight answer when you ask people their incomes, or the size of their families, or the addresses to their homes. These things are what make the security sirens at the back of our essentially animal minds go blaring, screaming at us to scurry up a tree and hide. And that’s what most of them do; in my line of work, the human equivalent of scurrying is hanging up.

Maybe that’s why those of us in this line get paid so much more than our telemarketer friends. If it weren’t for that, I would’ve left for a better place a long time ago. This wasn’t one of those self-satisfying jobs. As a matter of fact, there used to be a time when I could feel my soul eroding with every rejected call. I don’t feel that anymore.

But even if it’d cost me my soul to keep my family afloat, I would sell mine to the devil in a heartbeat, on discount with a 30-day money-back guarantee thrown in. My girl deserves the best the world had to offer, and if holding up the world for money required annoying the hell out of a hundred people a day, I’m all game. She has looks that could beat Helen of Troy in a ship-launching tournament, and to this day I still wonder why she settled with a bum like me when she could’ve easily bagged any upper class socialite hotel-empire heir from any ballroom party in the city. And you’d think a broad like that would pretty much come up last in every other department, but no; she cooks the most delicious steaks in the world, sings Annie as she cleans and decorates the apartment, and best of all, is absolutely, absolutely spectacular in bed. If Martha Stewart were an ugly stepsister, my wife would be Cinderella.

I love my Mona.

Before too long, though, the little hand pointed to four and the staff went about their going-home rituals. Many stayed back for the overtime. That’s reasonable. Despite whatever it is that psychologists and occasionally, Oprah tells you, as the wise Sean Combs said, it’s all about the Benjamins. The men of today have been reduced to living a life with but one single purpose, to make enough dough to run the bakery. Without the dough, you don’t get your donuts and cakes and pies. It was that simple. Those counterculture nutjobs advertising their oh-so-emancipating lifestyle, living it on the edge, taking each day as it slaps them in the faces, to the max and whatnot, are just fooling themselves. They should try and see if they can keep up with their bohemian lifestyles with what little cash in their bank accounts. And besides, how is it counterculture when Fubu and Timberland make millions every year from their misguided lifestyles?

These days there is no such thing as “keeping it real” anymore. Every facet of counterculture had been invaded by the pox of consumerism. And the men of today willingly infect themselves - ourselves - with the pox as if it were a vaccine for conformity. The smarter ones instead realise that it is money that actually serves as a panacea to all our problems.

That made me one of the wise. I chose to stay back. I do this almost every single time. Overtime pays well, and I needed something to bring home to show my baby how much I loved her, and to thank her for being everything that’s good in my life.

Mechanically, I called home on the company phone to warn her that today would be one of those days, where she need not cook for me tonight. It was a routine that she had learnt to live with. Sometimes she wouldn’t wait and would call me in the office to check.

The dialling tone came, growled and rumbled for almost a minute, and ended with a long, drawn-out whine. Mona wasn’t home. I decided that she must have gone out shopping with her girlfriends.

But whatever makes her happy, I guess. I live to please.

***

“So where do we finish off the job this time around?”

“Petersen’s Mire, down in the south.”

“That’s new. We’d better move them quick, then.”

The two men, one significantly taller than the other, and the other significantly rounder than the one, cleaned and holstered their guns before attending to the two lifeless figures lying on the backstreet pavement. Blankets and comforters enveloped the bodies, which the men lifted - with great effort - into a waiting car’s trunk. There was already a body there, so only one could be fit inside, while the other went in the backseat. Then the engine started, the headlights came on, and the car sped out of the alley and onto the road.

The taller one was behind the wheel, manoeuvring the car through the streets of Phobos City. He took a detour at every opportunity, like a crafty cabbie who makes rides seem longer to squeeze every penny out his passengers. It was a force of habit, for he was indeed an unscrupulous taxi driver. Or more exactly, he used to be one, until his employers found out. Nonetheless, it was a useful habit. There tended to be fewer people around the snaking routes he takes, so there was a reduced chance of being spotted with an extremely pale-faced woman with a permanent grimace riding in the backseat.

“Aww, Sammy, you just had to sit her up straight, didn’t you?”

“What? I’m just doing you a favour.”

“How is blocking my rear view with the bobbing head of a dead chick helping me?”

“Well, I thought it’d be good to look at something pretty while you’re driving.”

“If she were alive, yeah. But she’s dead. We offed her. Am I supposed to get some satisfaction out of this?”

“She’s a looker. Appreciate that a bit, won’t you? Jeez, Frank, and here I was thinking that you’d at least enjoy the view.”

Frank became exasperated. “Just go tip her over, damn it. I don’t wanna keep having to look at her. And cover her face while you’re at it, will you?”

“Oh alright. She’s just fucking gorgeous is all I’m saying. Pity we had to off her.”

“As though we had a choice.”

The rounder one, Sammy, sidled up to the backseat and proceeded to lie the woman down. He unrolled the covers blanketing the body and took an appraising look. “Shit, what a waste of a fine rack.”

“What the hell? Quit your act and get back in front!”

“I’d jump her.”

“What? Oh God no, now you’re talking about necrophilia. Fuck you, you sick bastard, fuck you!”

“Oh come on, don’t come telling me that you’ve never thought of fucking one of our targets before.”

“Well, yeah I do, but not after I kill them!”

“There should be a first time for everything. And since you’re the one driving and I have nothing better to do…”

The car made a very sudden and very hard turn, throwing everything in the car off the seats like laundry in a washing machine. Sammy crashed his head into a window, releasing a sickening crack as skull met glass.

“Motherfucker!” he yelled, separating the first and second halves of the word with a pause. “What’d you do that for, asshole?!”

“Shut up and get the hell back in front, you jackass.”

“It was only a passing comment,” Sammy grumbled as he returned to the front.

“Passing comment, my ass. Necrophilia is the single worst thing you can ever do to disrespect a dead body. Where’re your principles, man?”

“Principles? Frank, we’re thugs for Chrissakes, we don’t need no stinkin’ principles.”

“Yeah we do, and one of them says not to fuck with dead chicks. Even though we’re just thugs, we have to have a specific code of conduct to go by, y’know? Otherwise it’d be all chaos and all.”

“But if you have principles, you’re leaving yourself wide open to stupid things like guilt. It’s easier to kill someone if you don’t give a shit. Do you give a shit?”

“That’s not the point, what I’m trying to say is that even as hired killers we should treat our jobs with respect and do it in a gentlemanly manner.”

“Like what? ‘Hullo good ma’am, may I please forcefully perform intercourse with you before I blow your bloody head off with my .45? Oh thank you very much.’” Sammy said that with a passable imitation of a pretentious British accent.

“No, no, you got it wrong. I meant like the mafia in Godfather. Y’know, Brando and Pacino and all. They’ve got principles, they don’t, uh, sell drugs and stuff. And how it’s not personal, but it’s all business. Yeah.”

“Well, we ain’t in no mafia now, are we? Hell, we kill those kinda people, Frank.”

“Even so, they still have my respect. Mean little Italian bastards, each and every one of them, and they’ve got suits and accents and all that jazz. It’s hard not to like them, dead or alive.”

“They’re better off dead than alive, though.”

Frank chuckled half-heartedly. “You got that right. Alright, we’re here.”

The car drove down a grassy path, away from the road and into Petersen’s Mire. After a minute or so, Frank parked the car in a large clearing overlooking a peat bog. The place was exactly how anyone would expect it to be; dark, dank, and altogether generally uninviting. The smell that permeates the air, although the thugs are unable to give it an appropriate adjective, brought to their minds the words coal and vegetables.

Normally, the mire would often be visited by amateur cooks with a predilection for wild berries. During winter, the biting cold became as much a deterrent to people as fo sign would, making it the perfect place to dispose of the murdered. And so Frank and Sammy began unloading the bodies from the car - once again, with great difficulty.

“Shit, it’s really cold here,” Sammy muttered through his teeth. They weren’t dressed in proper winter clothing.

“Hold still, and we can do this faster.” Frank was somewhat irritated by Sammy’s hopping from foot to foot as they were carrying one of the bodies. The deceased was a man in his late 30s, and in what was probably his best suit - which they would have kept if not for the bulletholes and the blood. With the tiniest tinge of regret, they flung the body into the bog. They did the same for the original driver of the car, a relatively old man who, as far as the thugs were concerned, might not have minded having his life ended after all.

Then they came to the broad, which Sammy offered to dump alone. “Bye-bye, birdie,” he said as he rolled the woman, wrapped in comforters like a comical representation of sushi rolls, down the banks and into the bog. The two men watched the body bob in the water several times, refusing to sink. Frank stuck a foot out and gave it a push, and the woman floated, ever so slowly, towards somewhere deeper. It was a while before she finally relented and sunk.

That was only one half of a job well done. There was still the car to attend to. “Now let’s get the hell out of here,” Frank said, “We still gotta get to Hernandez’s, and I don’t wanna be home too late.”

With that, the thugs went back into the car and drove away from the mire.